Milton Berle (L), Bob Hope and Sid Caesar wave to the audience after being introduced on stage at the 50th Anniversay Emmy Awards in Los Angeles in this September 13 1998 file photo. Caesar, a pioneer of American television sketch comedy as the star and creative force of "Your Show of Shows," during the 1950s, died on February 12, 2014 at age 91, according to his friend and former collaborator, Carl Reiner. REUTERS/Gary Hershorn/Files (UNITED STATES - Tags: ENTERTAINMENT OBITUARY PROFILE)

Photo: Gary Hershorn, Reuters

Milton Berle (L), Bob Hope and Sid Caesar wave to the audience...

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FILE - 2014 FEBRUARY 12: Comedian Sid Caesar, 91, has reportedly died at 91. circa 1960: US comedians and actors Sid Caesar and Bob Hope (1903 - 2003) dining in the Wedgwood Room of the Walfdorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Sid Caesar, a comedic force of nature who became one of television's first stars in the early 1950s and influenced generations of comedians and comedy writers, died Wednesday at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 91.

Mr. Caesar largely faded from the public eye in his middle years as he struggled with crippling self-doubt and addiction to alcohol and pills. But from 1950 to 1954, he and his co-stars on the live 90-minute comedy-variety extravaganza "Your Show of Shows" dominated the Saturday night viewing habits of millions of Americans. In New York, a group of Broadway theater owners tried to persuade NBC to switch the show to the middle of the week because, they said, it was ruining their Saturday business.

Television comedy in its early days was dominated by boisterous veterans of vaudeville and radio who specialized in broad slapstick and snappy one-liners. Mr. Caesar introduced a different kind of humor to the small screen, at once more intimate and more absurd, based less on jokes or pratfalls than on characters and situations. It left an indelible mark on American comedy.

"If you want to find the ur-texts of 'The Producers' and 'Blazing Saddles,' of 'Sleeper' and 'Annie Hall,' of 'All in the Family' and 'M*A*S*H' and 'Saturday Night Live,'" Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times when he was its chief theater critic, "check out the old kinescopes of Sid Caesar."

A list of Mr. Caesar's writers over the years reads like a comedy all-star team. Woody Allen and Mel Brooks did some of their earliest writing for him. So did the most successful playwright in the history of the American stage, Neil Simon. Carl Reiner created one landmark sitcom, "The Dick Van Dyke Show"; Larry Gelbart was the principal creative force behind another, "M*A*S*H." Mel Tolkin wrote numerous scripts for "All in the Family." The authors of the two longest-running Broadway musicals of the 1960s, Joseph Stein ("Fiddler on the Roof") and Michael Stewart ("Hello, Dolly!"), were Mr. Caesar alumni as well.

Sketches on "Your Show of Shows" and its successor, "Caesar's Hour" (1954-57), were as likely to skewer the minutiae of domestic life as to lampoon classic Hollywood movies, arty foreign films and even operas.

By the late 1950s Mr. Caesar was off the air, a victim of changing tastes as well as personal problems. He made a triumphant comeback on Broadway in 1962, playing seven characters in "Little Me," a musical created by Cy Coleman, Carolyn Leigh and Simon. (A concert revival of "Little Me" was part of the Encores! series at City Center this month.) A year later Mr. Caesar held his own among comedy heavyweights like Milton Berle, Mickey Rooney and Jonathan Winters in the hit movie "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World." But his problems soon got the better of him, and his comeback was short-lived.

Sidney Caesar was born Sept. 8, 1922, in Yonkers, the youngest of three sons of Jewish immigrants, Max and Ida Caesar. Max Caesar, who emigrated from Poland, owned and operated a luncheonette with his wife, who had come from Russia. In a 1987 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Caesar looked back on his early success and subsequent failures, both of which he admitted he had been unprepared to handle, and reflected on the perspective he said he had finally achieved.

"Everybody wants to have a goal: I gotta get to that goal, I gotta get to that goal, I gotta get to that goal," he said. "Then you get to that goal, and then you gotta get to another goal. But in between goals is a thing called life that has to be lived and enjoyed - and if you don't, you're a fool."